Music of brain stress level

Abstract

This report contains the introduction of terminology used in the project and the description of the process of developing a sonification system, which transforms a human brain EEG signal to a piece of music. The EEG signals under relaxation and stress would undergo the sonification process, and the resulted music pieces were taken down and compared. This sonification system could be used in indicating various pressure levels and analyzing the complex nature of the signal, especially in the area of neurofeedback therapy. The sonification system was created using Matlab to extract the useful signal information and to apply the sonification rules. The system would produce music note data as output. Then, a music creation software called FL Studio was used to transfer the music note data into music piece. The sonification rules applied in the process were taken from a study entitled “Scale-Free Music of the Brain”. The 2 musical pieces created had distinct differences in the areas of rhythm, pitch and volume changes. In the area of rhythm, the EEG under relaxation produced a musical piece that had a livelier and more peaceful rhythm than the musical piece of the EEG under stress. For pitch and volume change, the musical piece of the EEG under stress had sharper pitch and volume changes. Another sonification rule can be applied to get better result to analyze the music under different mental state. However, this sonification rule has not been used in this project due to the limitation of data.